Google accuses Microsoft of copying search results

Google and Microsoft have kicked off a feisty public
argument after Google ran a sting operation, which it says proves competitor Bing is using
Google's data to improve its own search listings.

It all started with tarsorrhaphy,
an obscure eyelid-based surgical procedure. In the summer of 2010,
Google noticed that torsorophy -- an unusual misspelling of the
procedure -- would be automatically corrected in its own search
engine, and the procedure's correct Wikipedia article would appear
first.

At the time, Google says, Bing was flummoxed by the misspelling.
But later in the summer, a search for the misspelled torsorophy on
Bing would be silently corrected, and the correct Wikipedia article would be shown.

"Over the next few months we noticed that URLs from Google
search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency
for all kinds of queries: popular queries, rare or unusual queries
and misspelled queries," Google fellow Amit Singhal wrote on the company's official blog.

To test its theory, the company created a sting operation.
It artificially linked random and unique webpages to 100 completely
nonsense strings of letters. Searching "hiybbprqag" would show a
seating chart on a ticket website and searching
"delhipublicschool40 chdjob" would show a credit union. They were
synthetic queries, designed to trip up cheaters, a bit like digital
watermarks or "trap
streets" on maps.

Microsoft has publicly responded to the accusations. A
company spokesperson toldZDNet outright, "We do not copy Google's
results." Bing's corporate vice president, Harry Shum, elaborated
on this defensive position, on the search engine's official blog.

"We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our
ranking algorithm," Shum explains, "A small piece of that is
clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to
sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us
improve the experience for all users."

What Shum is saying is that Bing collects data from some Internet Explorer users as they
trawl the web. If that user happens to go to Google, Bing will make
note of the user's experience on its competitors product, and use
the results to improve its own service. Is that cheating? Microsoft
doesn't think so, but Google isn't so happy. "We'd like for this
practice to stop," the company writes.

"We've invested thousands of person-years into developing
our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right
answer every time they search, and that's not easy," Singhal says.
And he issues a stern message to Microsoft. "We look forward to
competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there --
algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search
results from a competitor." Ouch.